Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure—bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud that allows you to build and deploy hybrid applications anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Today at the annual PASS Summit conference, we announced a new preview of Azure SQL Database coming later this year that represents another major milestone for our database-as-a-service. With this preview, we continue our journey to bring industry-leading in-memory technologies to the cloud as well as unlock new functionality that makes it even easier to move SQL Server database applications to the cloud.
Primarily focused on unlocking the most popular T-SQL functions, this preview will help you work with heavier database workloads, improve monitoring and troubleshooting, and support more robust applications with support for key programmability functions while support for columnstore index queries will help improve performance for data mart-type analytics.
Full documentation and detailed enhancements will be published upon availability of the preview, however, key highlights are as follows:

Improved monitoring and troubleshooting: Extended Events (XEvents) and visibility into over 100 new table views via an expanded set of Database Management Views (DMVs).

I am incredibly excited for you to try this preview later this year. These new preview capabilities will be offered as part of the new service tiers, which deliver an industry-leading SLA at 99.99% availability, larger database size, built-in data protection capabilities and predictable performance. Combine this with the Elastic Scale technologies that allow you to scale out to thousands of databases for processing 10s of terabytes of OLTP data, and the SQL Database service becomes a clear choice for any cloud-based mission critical application.
This new preview, combined with last week’s announcements of Azure Data Factory and Azure Stream Analytics and our full portfolio of data services, which also includes DocumentDB, Azure Search, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure HDInsight, help to round out a complete data platform that makes it easier for you to capture, transform, and analyze any data—using the tools, languages and frameworks you want in a trusted environment on-premises and in the cloud.
Stay tuned for more information!